Model of Ancient Indian Vimana Aircraft Aerodynamically Tested

This is another UFO-related video from the History channel, which has become notorious for having abandoned history in favour of programmes about UFOs. The Vimanas were flying ships recorded in the ancient Hindu scriptures about 1,800 years ago. Some Indian nationalists and that part of the UFO milieu interested in an ancient aliens and lost high technology have suggested that this indicates that Indians knew about aircraft and space travel from far back in their history. The video shows one aircraft engineer building a model of a Vimana as described by the Hindu scriptures and then testing it in a small window tunnel to see whether it would in fact fly. The test shows that it would have generated lift, and that it therefore would have been able to take flight. The engineer very carefully tells the interviewer this, and I noticed that he doesn’t actually say whether this indicated that it existed in reality or not. I’m sceptical of the Vimana, as I think they’re probably mythological. But this test is interesting.

Video of Flying Saucer-Shaped Drone

I’ve also been looking through a few videos about flying saucers and unusual aircraft. One of these was this video posted by Mashable on their YouTube channel three years ago. It shows a saucer-shaped drone, the ADIFO – All-Directions Flying Object – zipping about the sky. The video claims it’s far more versatile and manouverable than conventional quadcopters as it can move in any direction immediately. It’s designers are, or were, looking for a partner to begin producing the aircraft industrially.

I wonder if this isn’t the only drone like this to have been developed and that some of them may be responsible for UFO sightings.

The Smuggling of the Hungarian Crown Jewels to America: the Archetype for the Later Crash Retrieval Stories?

Just watched a very interesting talk from ASSAP, a paranormal study group, on Zoom tonight about the 1977 ITV UFO hacking. This was an incident in which someone hacked into ITN news at 5.10 on a Saturday evening purporting to be an alien delivering a message of peace and warning us against using our weapons. Viewers saw the customary newsreader, but the audio was replaced by this message from Ashtar, Villon, or Gillon of Space Command. The hack was confined to a part of the Southern Television ITV network, so only people in Dorset and Hampshire saw it, although obviously it was national news the next day. The Independent Broadcasting Authority stated it was a hoax, but obviously there were questions about how they could know. The theories were that it was done by Ufologists trying to make people interested in their subject, or just hoaxers who knew a little bit about it. They’ve now tracked down the probably hoaxer, Bob Tomalski, a ‘gadget guru’ who certainly did know his way around broadcasting engineering, but who believed passionately in broadcasting freedom and had been involved in pirate radio. It was an open secret amongst his friends that he was responsible.

But the speaker, Neil Nixon, warned that the incident showed how technology could be used to fake paranormal events and you have to be sceptical about some of the evidence presented. And the military and intelligence services are not above spreading false stories about UFOs. The examples he gave were of Richard Doty, a secret agent responsible for sending Paul Bennewitz insane. Bennewitz was a military contractor, who believed he was seeing UFOs flying in and out of Kirtland Air Force Base. In fact he was seeing top secret research craft, and Doty was one of two agents sent to curtail his interests by spinning stupid yarns and giving him falsified information about UFOs before telling him that it was all fake.

The other example was the smuggling of the crown of St. Stephen, part of the Hungarian crown jewels, out of the country to America in 1956. The servicemen involved were told, however, that it was the engine and wings of a UFO. The speaker argued that if formed the classic pattern for later crash retrieval stories, in which special troops from the army or air force recover a downed UFO and bring it back to a secret base for study. In the case of the crown of St. Stephen, it went to Fort Knox.

A really interesting tale, but I think the archetype of the later crash retrieval accounts was the Roswell incident, regardless of whether you believe it to be a genuine crashed alien spacecraft or a mogul spy balloon.

Robots, Rock and Fashion

As you could probably tell from my piece about the very weird outfits sported by Sam Smith and Harry Styles at this year’s Grammys and Brit Awards, I’m not a fashionista. And I still remember Punk fashion designer Vivienne Westwood getting very narked on Wogan back in the 1980s when the audience started laughing at her extremely bizarre creations. ‘Why are they laughing?’, she wailed, followed by ‘Well, it went down very well in Milan’. Which it probably did, but I suspect that most ordinary Italians probably have no more patience for bonkers and unwearable clothing than we Brits or anyone else in the world.

But I am interested in robots and in art and music that includes them. And there have been a number of fashion designers who have included them in their shows. Alexander McQueen had this performance as part of his spring/summer 1999, where two industrial robots spray paint the model’s dress while an operatic aria wails in the background. The video is from the CoutureDaily channel on YouTube.

Then there’s this video of ‘Rock Meets Robots at Philippe Plein Fashion Show’, posted seven years ago on his YouTube channel by linearnetworkslive. This has the models gliding along a conveyor belt while industrial robots also move about the stage. You’ll also see the robot band Compressorhead, and the music for the show includes Kraftwerk, natch.

Plein also had another fashion show with a similar theme. This had Titan the Robot walking about the stage talking, before a giant UFO descended from the ceiling and a glamorous woman in a black catsuit walked out. Titan took her hand, and the two walked around the stage a bit more while Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ played in the background.

A female robot also made its debut at Tokyo Fashion Week as shown in this video, also from YouTube, put up by AP Archive. It’s interesting as a spectacle, but I’m afraid all the dialogue is in Japanese and their are no subtitles, so I have no idea what they’re saying.

I also found this interview posted by Dremel on their YouTube channel with the international fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht. Wipprecht describes herself as a fashion technician, who includes technology in her creations. She says that fashion is analogue, so she wanted to make it digital. One of her creations is a spider dress, which has little robotic spider legs about the neck and shoulders. It has motion sensors, which activate the legs as if they’re attacking if you come into the wearer’s personal space. Which is a bit scary. Wipprecht describes some of her techniques and tools, which includes Dremel’s 3-D printers, so the video’s a bit of an advert for the company. It reminds me a little of the short-lived vogue for wearable computers that briefly appeared in the ’90s before fizzling out.

These Wipprecht and the McQueen and Plein fashion shows are all very much in the aesthetic style of the Futurists, an aggressive Italian artistic movement that celebrated the novelty, speed and excitement of industry and the new machine age. In his ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ of 1909, the movement’s founder, Filippo Marinetti, raved about how the movement would sing of workers toiling beneath electric moons, cars and aeroplanes and stated ‘we look forward to the future union of man and machine.’ I despise the Futurists’ aggressive nationalism, their militarism and ‘scorn for women’, but do like their exploration of the machine aesthetic in their art and music. One of the pieces they composed was entitled ‘The Agony of the Machine’, while another was an opera about the love a steam locomotive had for her driver. They were also interested in fashion, and reacted against tasteful, dark clothing demanding colourful attire that positively screamed at you. These fashion shows and Wipprecht bring this aesthetic into the 21st century and the age of AI and real robots.

But back in the ’70s before the technology had emerged to incorporate real robots into pop music, we had Dee Dee Jackson singing ‘Automatic Lover’ accompanied by a robot on stage, well, a man in a suit playing a robot. It was briefly mentioned in an episode of ‘Robusters’ in 2000 AD when the band plays it in an underground robot bar. Here, for fans of 70s disco, is a video I found of it, again on YouTube, on bchfj’s channel.

Has the American Air Force Really Shot Down UFOs? And If They Have, Are They Alien Spaceships?

I’m reposting this because some of the great contributors on this blog have reported that it’s vanishing from their computers. I honestly can’t think why this should be the case, but here it is again.

‘Trev, one of the many great commenters on this blog, alerted me yesterday to the news that the Americans have claimed to have shot down several UFOs, including one over Alaska. He linked this to a news report that said they were probably balloons. Since then I’ve come across various accounts that contradict this. CNN reported on the incident, stating that the air force pilots said they did not know what they were looking at. One also said that he was unable to work out how it flew. Other details have also emerged. The pilots said it was not like the Chinese spy balloon. One was the size of a car, and another, or perhaps the same one, was cylindrical.

I was reading the comments on one of the YouTubers, who covered this and most of them were sceptical. The obvious question was raised of how an alien spaceship, which was so far ahead of us technologically that it could cross the vast gulfs of interstellar space, could be shot down by us using our limited technology. The majority of commenters smelled a rat. They considered that it was a hoax intended to prepare the way for some kind of totalitarian takeover. One religious individual went further and suggested that it was a disguise for the appearance of the fallen angels and the reign of Lucifer. There was a similar conspiracy theory put forward in the ’90s by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince in their book The Stargate Conspiracy. They claimed that the US government was plotting a totalitarian coup by staging the descent of alien space gods, and connected this with the Nine, a group of discarnate entities contacted by American scientists and psychical researchers, including Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller, in the 1970s. I can’t remember all the details, but the book somehow took in the Egyptian pyramids and Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which argued that the Dogon of Mali had been contacted in prehistory by extraterrestrials from the star Sirius. The last thing I heard about their book, it was being claimed that they had intended it as a joke, but that this had been so convincing it went over most people’s heads. I read it, and I have to say that there was nothing in it which suggested it was a spoof.

I do think, however, we have to be very careful with this one. UFO stands for a ‘Unidentified Flying Object’. Although it has entered popular culture as meaning a visiting alien spacecraft, I wonder if, in this case, it means precisely that: a flying object that cannot be identified, but which may not be extraterrestrial. I’ve noticed that recently UFOs have been renamed UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and wondered why that new term wasn’t used instead. Of course it could just be that phenomena can include a purely natural explanation for UFOs. One possible explanation is that they are poorly understood meteorological phenomena like ball lightning. But what the Americans claim to have shot down was structured craft. On the other hand, it could well be some kind of unidentified terrestrial aircraft, and the Americans have described it as UFO in order to play on the ambiguity of the term and suggest it was an alien vehicle when it may well not have been.

Way back in the 90s a book was published claiming that UFO sightings and reports were actually those of drones. The author was a nasty individual with a background in various Fascist groups. It obviously can’t be applied to all UFO sightings, but it’s quite possible that it may explain some. Mark Pilkington in his book Mirage Men describes his interviews with a number of American air force personnel and experts on military aviation, who tell him that top secret aircraft developed by the American military do have the ability to fake a UFO encounter. This includes interfering with airplane’s radar, which can be done using two separate radar beams and has been known about since the 1950s. If the Americans have such technology, then it’s very likely indeed that Russia and China also has it, or something similar. It’s also been clear from Bill Rose’s Flying Saucer Technology (Hersham: Ian Allan Publishing 2011) that countries around the world, including Britain, Germany, America and Russia, have been experimenting with disc-shaped aircraft almost since the invention of powered flight, and some of them look very exotic.

Artist’s rendition of a high-altitude VTOL ramjet developed by Lockheed for the US military for nuclear bombing and reconnaissance missions. from Rose, p. 104.

It’s possible that what was shot down was an terrestrial aircraft of this type, rather than anything from space.

On the other hand, perhaps it really is an alien spacecraft, and the American authorities have decided to hide it in plain sight by calling it as UFO on the understanding that this will cause the sceptics to discount it immediately.

It’ll be very interesting to see what else emerges about these encounters, though it won’t surprise me at all if the story is left to vanish so that we’ll be none the wiser.

Has the American Air Force Really Shot Down UFOs? And If They Have, Are They Alien Spaceships?

Trev, one of the many great commenters on this blog, alerted me yesterday to the news that the Americans have claimed to have shot down several UFOs, including one over Alaska. He linked this to a news report that said they were probably balloons. Since then I’ve come across various accounts that contradict this. CNN reported on the incident, stating that the air force pilots said they did not know what they were looking at. One also said that he was unable to work out how it flew. Other details have also emerged. The pilots said it was not like the Chinese spy balloon. One was the size of a car, and another, or perhaps the same one, was cylindrical.

I was reading the comments on one of the YouTubers, who covered this and most of them were sceptical. The obvious question was raised of how an alien spaceship, which was so far ahead of us technologically that it could cross the vast gulfs of interstellar space, could be shot down by us using our limited technology. The majority of commenters smelled a rat. They considered that it was a hoax intended to prepare the way for some kind of totalitarian takeover. One religious individual went further and suggested that it was a disguise for the appearance of the fallen angels and the reign of Lucifer. There was a similar conspiracy theory put forward in the ’90s by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince in their book The Stargate Conspiracy. They claimed that the US government was plotting a totalitarian coup by staging the descent of alien space gods, and connected this with the Nine, a group of discarnate entities contacted by American scientists and psychical researchers, including Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller, in the 1970s. I can’t remember all the details, but the book somehow took in the Egyptian pyramids and Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which argued that the Dogon of Mali had been contacted in prehistory by extraterrestrials from the star Sirius. The last thing I heard about their book, it was being claimed that they had intended it as a joke, but that this had been so convincing it went over most people’s heads. I read it, and I have to say that there was nothing in it which suggested it was a spoof.

I do think, however, we have to be very careful with this one. UFO stands for a ‘Unidentified Flying Object’. Although it has entered popular culture as meaning a visiting alien spacecraft, I wonder if, in this case, it means precisely that: a flying object that cannot be identified, but which may not be extraterrestrial. I’ve noticed that recently UFOs have been renamed UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and wondered why that new term wasn’t used instead. Of course it could just be that phenomena can include a purely natural explanation for UFOs. One possible explanation is that they are poorly understood meteorological phenomena like ball lightning. But what the Americans claim to have shot down was structured craft. On the other hand, it could well be some kind of unidentified terrestrial aircraft, and the Americans have described it as UFO in order to play on the ambiguity of the term and suggest it was an alien vehicle when it may well not have been.

Way back in the 90s a book was published claiming that UFO sightings and reports were actually those of drones. The author was a nasty individual with a background in various Fascist groups. It obviously can’t be applied to all UFO sightings, but it’s quite possible that it may explain some. Mark Pilkington in his book Mirage Men describes his interviews with a number of American air force personnel and experts on military aviation, who tell him that top secret aircraft developed by the American military do have the ability to fake a UFO encounter. This includes interfering with airplane’s radar, which can be done using two separate radar beams and has been known about since the 1950s. If the Americans have such technology, then it’s very likely indeed that Russia and China also has it, or something similar. It’s also been clear from Bill Rose’s Flying Saucer Technology (Hersham: Ian Allan Publishing 2011) that countries around the world, including Britain, Germany, America and Russia, have been experimenting with disc-shaped aircraft almost since the invention of powered flight, and some of them look very exotic.

Artist’s rendition of a high-altitude VTOL ramjet developed by Lockheed for the US military for nuclear bombing and reconnaissance missions. from Rose, p. 104.

It’s possible that what was shot down was an terrestrial aircraft of this type, rather than anything from space.

On the other hand, perhaps it really is an alien spacecraft, and the American authorities have decided to hide it in plain sight by calling it as UFO on the understanding that this will cause the sceptics to discount it immediately.

It’ll be very interesting to see what else emerges about these encounters, though it won’t surprise me at all if the story is left to vanish so that we’ll be none the wiser.

The Riout 103T Alerion: The Ornithopter that Almost Took Off

I was talking on another comments thread about ornithopters with Brian Burden, one of the many great commenters on this blog. Ornithopters are flying machines that work by flapping their wings like a bird or an insect, unlike helicopters or fixed wing aircraft, which use either propeller or jet engines. Some of the very first attempts at powered, heavier than air flight were ornithopters, whose inventors obviously sought inspiration from nature. As human-carrying aircraft, they haven’t been successful. They work as small models, and the early scale models the pioneering aviation inventors and engineers created did actually work, as have more recent model ornithopters and robots modelled on birds and insects. However there were severe problems scaling them up to work with humans. This did not prevent a series of pioneering inventors and aviators trying. One of those was E.P. Frost, who created a series of ornithopters over a decade from the late 19th to the early 20th century. The piccie below shows his 1903 ornithopter, powered by a three horsepower petrol engine and with wings covered in feathers. Another inventor was the French aviator, Passat, who constructed an ornithopter with four flapping wings, covered with fabric rather than feathers, and powered by a 4.5 horsepower motorcycle engine. When it was being tried out in 1912 on Wimbledon Common, it flew for about four hundred feet at a speed of under 15 mph before crashing into a tree. This did not deter Passat, who carried on his experiments into this form of aircraft despite ridicule and the success of fixed wing aircraft.

One of the other aviation pioneers interested in developing this type of aircraft was another Frenchman, Louis Riel, who went on to design the Riout 102T plane, which at one point seemed to be a successful aircraft if further improvements had been made. I found this video about it on Ed Nash’s Military Matters channel on YouTube. This notes the similarity between the four-winged design of the Riout plane and the multi-winged ornithopters of the recent Dune film. This suggests that Frank Herbert, Dune’s author, might have been inspired by Riel’s aircraft. Riel had experimented with a two-winged ornithopter before the First World War before moving on to other projects. He retained his interest in ornithopters, however, and 1937 created the Riout 102T Alerion, which had four, fabric covered planes. Wind tunnel tests were originally promising, until an increase in engine power in one test destroyed the plane’s four wings. Riel had plans to improve and strengthen the wings, but by this time it was 1938. Hitler had annexed Austria and was moving into the Sudetenland, and France needed all its available aircraft to protect itself against German invasion. The project was therefore cancelled.

Brian wondered if computer design and control could result in a practical, human level ornithopter. I think it’s possible, especially as today’s aviation engineers are exploring the instabilities in flight that allow birds to fly so well in creating high performance aircraft, that would need a degree of computer control in flight. One of the issues looks to my like the stresses on the wings caused by flapping, but it may be that this could be solved using the more resilient and durable materials available to modern engineers, which the early pioneers didn’t have. Riel’s plane is not entirely forgotten. Its remains, minus the wings and covering, are in one of the French aviation museums. Perhaps one day they’ll inspire a new generation of engineers to experiment with similar aircraft.

Friar Roger Bacon’s Technological Prediction

Roger Bacon was a 13th century English friar and early scientist. He was an Aristotelian, but believed in experiment rather than just relying on observation and the acceptance of received opinion. He also predicted some of the inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as self-driving ships, cars and flying machines. He made these startling predictions in a letter to a William of Paris in a letter, the Epistola de Secretis Operibus of 1260. This stated

‘Now an instrument for sailing without oarsmen can be produced such that the larger ships, both riverboats and seagoing vessels, can be moved under the direction of a single man at a greater velocity than if they were filled with men. A chariot can be made that moves at unimaginable speed without horses; such we think to have been the scythe-bearing chariots with which men fought in antiquity. And an instrument for flying can be made, such that a man sits in the middle of it, turning some sort of device by which artificially constructed wings beat the air in the way a flying bird does’.

(Trans. Michael S. Mahoney, quoted in Mike Ashley, Yesterday’s Tomorrows: The Story of Classic British Science Fiction in 100 Books (London: British Library 2020) 56.

As you can see, he doesn’t know how such devices could be constructed, and his description of how an aircraft would work is wrong, although people have constructed such ornithopters. But nevertheless he was right in that science and technological has led to the invention of these kinds of machines. It also struck me that there’s material in there for SF and Fantasy writers to imagine the kind of Middle Ages that would have arisen had Bacon or his contemporaries invented such devices, or what the ancient world would have been like had Bacon been right about the technology he believed they possessed.

What If Santa Upgraded His Sleigh for a State of the Art Stealth Plane?

As it’s the Christmas season I’m planning to leaven the serious stuff on this channel with more fun material just to spread a bit more cheer around in this new Winter of Discontent. And here’s a jolly bit of fun I found on the ‘Found and Explained’ YouTube channel. It discusses what would possibly result if Santa Claus upgraded his sleigh, which is more fitted to a time before modern technology when horse-drawn carriages and sleighs were the only or main vehicles available. This was all right until the story went global and its credibility was challenged by the problem of travelling around the world, including crossing the Atlantic to North America. Hence the need to upgrade to something more modern.

The video notes the apparent similarities between the supernatural qualities of Santa’s sleigh and UFOs. However, it doesn’t actually talk about using UFO technology, which in the UFO legend is available through back engineering crashed alien space craft. No, the video instead discusses how Santa would swap his sleigh for a state of the art stealth aircraft manufactured by Lockheed at their skunkworks, but incorporating other features from autonomous drones.

Santa’s new ‘sleigh’ would be a high-performance White Star aircraft, utilising pulse jet powered by nuclear energy to achieve speeds of Mach 10 to Mach 15. There would be no windows, and instead the crew would see out using technology that turned much of the cabin into viewscreens. Santa would not be able to deliver the presents personally, except in some circumstances where the consumption of mince pies is concerned, and so would deliver his presents using drones. When he was required to make a personal appearance, the craft would use the autopilot system from another, autonomous drone. Rudolf would not be able to survive the stresses he’d experience at the front of such a high velocity vehicle, and so on the nose of the aircraft himself would be a navigation system using information from satellite position systems.

The video acknowledges that there are problems with this design. Extra space would be needed for all the presents, drones, nuclear fuel and so on. This would be solved using the technology of Santa’s bag, which like the Bag of Holding in D & D games, has ample space to contain everything required.

Expense is also a problem, even given the vast wealth Santa must have to employ his army of elves on holiday pay, plus writing it all off as charity expenses. The video suggests that this could be solved by donating one or two White Stars to the American air force, where they could be reconverted to military aircraft complete with nuclear-tipped warheads. These could also be used against naughty children. And here the video shows the Grinch being fought with explosions.

It’s a bit of seasonal fun from the channel and obviously not meant to be taken seriously. I hope you enjoy it.

Graham Hancock – A Crank, Possibly, But Definitely No Racist

My discipline, archaeology, has been massively going after Graham Hancock this week. Hancock’s ah, um,, ‘maverick thinker’, I suppose you’d say, who’s been presenting a series on Netflix arguing that thousands of years ago there was a highly advanced civilisation that perished in a cataclysm, but passed on its secrets to other ancient civilisations around the world. This has understandably annoyed archaeologists and a number have put up videos, some of them lengthy and quite detailed, disproving him. Hancock’s been promoting this idea for some time now. Going back two decades and more, he had a series on Channel 4 with the title ‘Water World’ or something like it, also arguing that there was a global advanced civilisation, whose monuments have been covered up by a flood, as recorded in the Bible and other ancient religions. Now I’m sure that Hancock is wrong, and the criticisms of his dodgy history and archaeology are right. But I take exception to one of the other accusations levelled at him, which is that he is racist.

This accusation is partly based on his false ascription of the achievements of indigenous cultures around the world to this putative prehistoric civilisation. It denies those people the credit for their achievements. But the accusation is also that it’s similar to the ideas of some bonkers White supremacist groups, who are using Hancock’s ideas to promote themselves. One archaeologist posted a video saying that Hancock should have disavowed the use of his ideas by these fascists. It also criticised him for being friends with Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. There are fair criticisms to be made of both of these men. Peterson’s an arch-conservative and anti-feminist, but hardly a Nazi. Rogan was pushing anti-vax nonsense and is an advocate for some mind-expanding drugs. A few years ago people were accusing him of being a ‘gateway to the Alt-Right’. Possibly, but he also talks to people from the left, who are otherwise denied a platform by the lamestream media. Journalists like Abbie Martin, who talked about Israeli propaganda against the Palestinians and how she found, when she visited the beleaguered Arab nation, that the reality was nothing like the picture painted by the Israeli state. He’s also talked to biologists and journalists exposing the lies of the trans ideology. This is not Alt-Right, no matter what groups like Mermaids, Stonewall, Antifa and the rest say. The people criticising the gender ideology tend to be radical feminists, many from the socialist left. Part of their opposition against it is that it reduces masculinity and femininity to traditional, stereotypical sex roles. One of the feminist vloggers interviewed one of the leading activists against the trans ideology, who was furious that people like her were being presented as right-wing. Another feminist activist criticised Matt Walsh for misrepresenting feminists as uniformly in favour of trans ideology, and then criticising them for it. Rogan gives a voice to people outside the mainstream. Sometimes it’s rubbish, and sometimes it’s immensely valuable. He has also interviewed a number of Black celebs, so again, not a Nazi.

The White supremacist ideas being referred to seem to me to be the Traditionalist ideology of Giulio Evola. Evola was an Italian Fascist and occultist, who was a major ideological influence on the scumbuckets behind the Bologna railway bombing in the 1970s. A fascist group bombed the station, killing and maiming over a hundred people. Evola believed that there was a strongly hierarchical, ‘Aryan’ civilisation in Hyperborea in the arctic, which was responsible for all the subsequent cultural achievements of the civilisations around the world. This is twaddle. But Hancock’s ideas are also similar to those of others, which don’t come from people in the fascist fringe. A couple of years ago I picked up an old book, Colony Earth, which had been published in the 1970s. This claimed that Earth may have been an extraterrestrial colony, whose advanced civilisation was destroyed in a nuclear war. The pyramids may have been fall-out shelters, as were the megalithic tumuli in Britain. It’s an interesting read, but certainly wrong. I think Charles Berlitz, who started the Bermuda Triangle myth, also believed in this, supporting it in one of his books with artefacts from Aztec tombs that look like aircraft. Berlitz is someone else, who I’m fairly certain has absolutely no connection to fascism whatsoever.

And I don’t believe Hancock is either.

When he was travelling the world on his Channel 4 series he was accompanied by his wife, who is Sri Lankan. Now, White supremacists do not, as a rule, marry dark-skinned people from outside Europe. If they do, they’re angrily denounced as ‘race traitors’. In one edition of this earlier series, Hancock reported on the mysterious ruins of ancient city found off the coast of the Bay of Bengal. He was shown talking respectfully to an Indian gent, who told him how such findings tie in with Hindu ideas of the antiquity of civilisation and ancient Indian legends of flooded cities. Again, this isn’t quite behaviour you’d expect from a genuine White supremacist. He also travelled to South and Central America, where he proposed the old theory that the Mayans, Aztecs and other ancient Amerindian civilisations must have learned how to build their pyramids from someone else. I think this was once again ancient Egypt. But who brought that knowledge to the New World? Black Africans. He pointed to an Olmec bas relief of a warrior’s head, and declared its features to be ‘proudly African’. If this is racism, then its Afrocentrism rather than White supremacy. As for the ancient race behind these monuments, Hancock doesn’t say what colour they are. In this, he breaks with some of his predecessors, who say they must have been White because the legends of numerous Amerindian peoples state that vital parts of their culture were brought to them by White gods. Hancock is therefore less racialised in what he says than his predecessors.

I disagree profoundly with Hancock’s ideas, but he has a right to say them like everyone else. And if it piques people interest in these ancient cultures so that they want to find out what they were really like, that’s all to the good. But I do think it’s profoundly wrong to accuse him of racism. That just further cheapens the word and weakens it as a weapon against the real thing.